One or more aspects relate, in general, to facilitating processing within a computing environment, and in particular, to facilitating processing associated with decimal floating point operations.
Data may be represented in computing storage in many different formats, including a decimal floating point (DFP) format. Decimal floating point data may be represented in a plurality of different formats, including, e.g., a 128-bit quad precision format including 34 compressed binary coded decimal (BCD) digits of data, a 64-bit double precision format including 16 digits of compressed binary coded decimal data, and a 32-bit single precision format including 7 digits of compressed binary coded decimal data.
For decimal floating point operations, the operands of the operations exist in an encoded format, referred to as a densely packed decimal (DPD) encoding. With this encoding, the data is decompressed into binary coded decimal digits for processing operations, and then, recompressed into densely packed decimal data when processing is complete. Each group of 12 bits of binary coded decimal data is encoded into 10 bits of densely packed decimal data known as a declet. Though the dense format allows an increase in the number of binary coded decimal digits that can be stored in the format, decompression and recompression is required. This impacts system processing and performance.